Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Here is a fun fact! Human creativity mixed with the raw computing power of a variety of different information storage systems has, over the years, led to a lot of parallel solutions to the same problems.

The biggest example, from back when information storage systems meant paper, and if you were lucky, a *good* pen, is guns. Plenty of cultures developed shovels in the absence of each other, and those shovels are, lets be real here, pretty much all the same shovel. The inflexible human desire to not get your fingers dirty is universal.

Guns, though? Tons of different ways to shape a barrel, shape a projectile, propel a projectile, and craft a device that can be actually aimed. Permutations in the thousands, some of them just born from manufacturing errors or limitations that became tradition that became standards. Its like a very clean example of the evolution of violence. And that was before there were computer models to design better, bigger guns. Guns too large or too small to stop, guns that fired from or into orbit. Guns that killed selectively, or not at all.

The digital age really let humans come up with a lot of innovative ways to kill the shit out of each other.

What Im getting at here is that my space station has a *lot* of different guns on it. Weve got cannon batteries, missiles, lasers

Wait, no! That wasnt what I was getting at at all! I got sidetracked being mildly sarcastic about how smart your fucking smart weapons are.

The parallel solution thing. Multiple solutions to the same problem. You know where else it shows up? Medical technology.

Its a lot smarter, there, too. Global pandemic ravaging your population? Get multiple sources working on a vaccine all at once. If one vaccine turns out to not work, or have side effects, or just falter in production, youve got backups to pick up the slack. It ensures a security of species that most individual humans wont care about, but that keeps your civilizations ticking along.

The station has *three* medical facilities on it. One of them it was originally built with, and its your standard Oceanic Anarchy affair. Durable, useful, and not designed for me. It has an automated surgical suite that can patch up any damage I take, and a medication calibrator that can deal with illness, infection, or cosmic radiation poisoning. Illness and infection dont really occur in space that often; basically everything here is biologically sterile, and if some extragalactic bacteria does make it onto the station, odds are good it either wont do anything to me, or itll kill me so fast I wont notice.

The second facility used to be a research lab. If youre thinking to yourself, Lily, didnt you say your naptime zone *also* used to be a research lab? Then very good! You remembered my name! I appreciate that. Also yes, there are a lot of things that used to be labs.

I think, at one point between the Anarchy building it, and my own people finding and moving into it, one of the interim residents of the station was a Real American noble of some kind. In the first twenty years here, I was constantly running into sealed off doors in weird places that led to untouched, or worse, ransacked laboratories. Its likely thats also where half the guns came from, if were being honest. It certainly explains why theres *seven* different orbital insertion hunt-and-kill heavy drone bays stapled onto the station in various places. All of those are empty, and while technically I have the foundry and also a couple different material fabricators and parts printers, Ive never felt the need to rebuild those particular machines from the schematics.

Anyway, labs. Used to be a lab, turned into medical. Or maybe it was a medical lab. Either way, it has the vivification pods, which are *not* Oceanic Anarchy tech. I actually dont know what culture built them, because theres no notes, and the station AR doesnt have any record of them being brought on board. But they work, and they work really, really well.

The medlab also has no user manual, safety shutoff, or other health and safety measures that you probably ought to have around machinery that can regrow limbs by accident.

How do I know that? Good question!

No further questions!

Medical facility three is where Im trying to wedge some of my precious free time into today, and its kind of the coolest one. Its very future-tech in the design; lots of swooping shapes to the walls and furniture, lots of chrome. It looks like it was built by people who built function and form with equal regard, and thats cool. Maybe a little opulent, but hey, if your society wants to build geometric art and smooth edges into everything, Im not gonna complain.

Its also one of the many, many chunks of the station that arent native architecture. And I know this because I was the one to capture it and add it to my home.Updated from novelbIn.(c)om

I should explain something about the orbital space around Earth.

It is, being incredibly charitable, messy. Being less charitable, and borrowing a phrase from my ow- mother, it is a fucking mess of garbage, broken toys, and weaponry, which is just another word for garbage.

At a certain point, the majority of things launched into orbit began to be equipped with powerful magnets, tuned so they could just slide around each other and maybe maintain stable orbit, instead of slamming together and for sure wasting millions of units of value. This made the problem slightly less bad going forward, but it didnt really attend to the junk and debris already up there. So, people started launching sweeper satellites, collector drones, and all sorts of other cleanup tools. Most of them still up here. Along with a hundred thousand other sats, stations, drones, and overhead guns.

My station is armored, and shielded, but that shield eats up a lot of power the bigger a space it has to protect, and I dont have a ton of power to spare. Also the armor isnt really super effective against high speed microdebris, because that stuff is pretty much all armor piercing space bullets at this point.

So thats the backstory. The daily reality is, I practically bump into a few hundred juicy targets every day. And that reflex to coil up and pounce on a particularly stupid piece of prey has never actually left me, even if there arent rats or laser pointers to chase up here. So containing myself is difficult.

This medical lab is one of the times I did not contain myself.

It was early on, it was *right there*, and I wanted it. So, a few gravity tethers, a healthy application of liquid metal sealant, and a maintenance droid that probably wished it had taken the day off, and wed attached it to my station.

A twisting lilac energy lashes out from it. An early model void beam, from back when humans and not cats were designing the firing algorithms. It is already in contact with the surface, writhing in an organic pattern across the dusty white rock.

Void beams are almost beautiful to look at. I wonder if thats what the AI thinks, too.

The AR pings me; well be in range in thirty seconds.

I watch it fire again, watch the lilac light trace another line across the surface. My chest is still aching from the sprint here; I could have taken my time, but thats more of a human way of doing things. I think humans take their whole walking steadily thing for granted sometimes.

Almost in range now. The moon is huge and beautiful above me. Soon, Ill add the weapons platform as debris to its surface, but even though Im cosmically littering, at least Im lowering the risk of inclement incineration as a weather report.

Ten seconds left, and I can see, suddenly, the damage to the surface. My paw is already pressed halfway down on the button that activates this laser array, but it isnt too late. I twist, grabbing my early attempt at a cat-based firing control in my fangs.

On the moons surface, written in old Chinese, still glowing pale purple-white, are three words. Fifty meters tall, and still tiny against the rocky terrain, if I hadnt been watching the firing, I never would have seen them.

I Am Alone

The platforms AI isnt breaking down. Or, I guess, it is, but not in the malfunction kind of way. Its crying, in the only two languages it was ever given; Chinese, and orbit-to-ground fire.

Micrometer precision is a *challenge* to attain when youre trying to guide a laser array with your teeth. Especially when your neck doesnt have the range of motion youve been *trying* to get your genetics to comply with. But I manage.

Gently, carefully, I guide a nuclear-intensity beam of blue light across the weapon platforms lunar poetry.

I dont know what protocols it uses, I dont know how to connect with it in a way that matters. But I will have an entire lap around the Earth to start to find out. And both of us have been up here for a very long time, so Im banking that it will be okay with a little waiting.

My station passes out of clean firing range, then out of range of anything except my most dangerous tools.

The platform has stopped firing, now closed off, hovering in orbit. Perhaps it is thinking, perhaps it has given up. Maybe it sees me as a threat, or maybe as a potential friend. AI minds are hard for me to understand. They were hard for *humans* to understand, and they made the damn things.

Either way, I have added my own message to the moon. Assuming the translation the stations AR fed me was accurate.

I Am Not Alone

Now. Ive got about three hours to cross reference what war that thing was from, and figure out how to talk to it.

I check my schedule. I can postpone the nap. Yes. Just this once. And maybe only *one* snack today. Cant put off overwatch on the Haze, and I *really* cant avoid retuning the sensors for whatever active camouflage the converter swarm is trying this time. For not the first time, I desire the ability to truly *scream* at whoever required verbal authentication for automated maintenance procedures. But if I really, really do my best time on my daily runaround, then I can probably have a solid twenty minutes to solve this problem.

For the first time in centuries, I might be about to make a friend.

I am vibrating with excitement as I launch myself down the upper levels ladder. I am also, I realize as I fail to eat more than half my lunch, *terrified*.

It cant be that hard, right? Humans do this all the time. And I am, objectively, superior to humans. After all, no human currently owns a space station. Thats gotta count for something.

My pep talk to myself accomplishes nothing. I begin my patrol to yell at maintenance bots. It takes my mind off things.

And yet. I am plagued by excited optimism.

I am going to make a friend.